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Google Ready To Practice Selective Memory

Selective memory is a psychological strategy people employ when it’s just too painful to remember the details of past events. Now, Google is about to engage in a technological form of selective memory ‒ or its flip-side, selective forgetting ‒ as a way of complying with the European Union’s “right to be forgotten.” Since the European Court of Justice issued its seminal right-to-be-forgotten decision in May 2014, Google has complied with orders to remove or block links to certain search results only on its European domains (e.g., www.google.es) and not on other domains (e.g., www.google.com) accessible within the EU. But European data protection authorities, particularly the French CNIL, have insisted that this is not enough, and that Google must instead remove or block “forgettable” search results on all its domains. This has created the prospect that European complainants, backed by heavy-handed DPAs, can effectively determine what information the rest of the world can and can’t see (or at least easily find, using a search engine). Google has resisted the pressure, but now appears to have hit on a compromise: It will block or remove relevant links from search results on its European domains and make the same results inaccessible on all its domains from within the European country where the complaint was filed. But the results will remain accessible on non-EU domains outside of that country.

Compare jurisdictions: BYOD: Bring Your Own Device

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